That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore:The Uneasy Relationship Between Art and Humour.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Doctor
Doctor who?
You just said it.

What's yellow and dangerous?
Shark infested custard.

What's the difference between a letter box and an elephant's bum?
I don't know.
Well, I won't ask you to post a letter then!

Why did Spock have his hands down the toilet boll?
He was looking for the Captain's log.

Bedwyr Williams - Fucking Inbred Welsh Sheepshagger (2018)

None of those jokes above are actually very funny and, so it turns out, neither was any of the art in the South London Gallery's recent KNOCK KNOCK:Humour in Contemporary Art exhibition. Which was something of a shame for a show that "aims to raise a smile at a time of much unease and upheaval in the world".

Though, to be fair to the curators, they also claim to be setting out to "explore the things that do and indeed don't make us laugh in contemporary art" and, in that, they have at least half-succeeded. It's not so much that it's a terrible show, more that art, on the whole, doesn't tend to be very funny ha ha. Funny ridiculous - yes. Funny peculiar - yes. But it's highly unlikely any visitor will have left this show having had their ribs seriously tickled. An insult to the memory of Ken Dodd.

Artists as renowned, and as varied in their approach, as Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp have employed humour to their own ends in the making of art and if even the greats can't make us laugh then what hope a series of mostly relatively unknown artists. With the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Sarah Lucas, and Martin Creed the most notable exceptions.

Bedwyr Williams' Fucking Inbred Welsh Sheepshagger certainly catches the eye, parked as it is in the corridor of the main building as you come in, and as a piece of art it's certainly curious (echoes of both Georgie O'Keeffe and Robert Rauschenberg) but, other than inverting xenophobic Welsh stereotyping it doesn't say much, and it's not particularly funny. Nothing here is. I'm not gonna make that point for each work I write about. Consider it said.

Judith Hopf has made both a foot and a ball out of brick and cement. They're lying around on the floor. As a piece of craft it's quite impressive, and it's not aesthetically displeasing, but what does it say about art, about humour, about feet, about balls, about football? I don't know. Your guess is a good as mine. I scratched my head, and not for the last time.

Judith Hopf- Brick-Foot (2016)

Judith Hopf - Ball in Remembrance of Annette Wehrmann (2016)

Roy Lichtenstein - Knock, Knock Poster (1975)

Roy Lichtenstein's work does exactly what his work always does. It gives you a very clear, very precise image that you don't need to spend too long looking at. I was surprised to see one of his in the exhibition and it also occurred to me that it may well have been the first monochrome piece of his I'd ever encountered. It was also, by some margin, the oldest and probably the best thing on display.

Hardeep Pandhal's cartoony Indian characters worked quite well in close proximity to the Lichtenstein line-cut. Although it's hard to say how successful his attempt to use satire to undermine authority actually is. I just thought they were nice, bright, and colourful. Perhaps with the promised, but undelivered, sound they would have made more sense politically. Who knows?

Hardeep Pandahl - Untitled (2017)

Hardeep Pandahl - Untitled (2017)

Hardeep Pandahl - Untitled (2017)

Ceal Floyer - Saw (2015)



Ceal Floyer- Mousehole (1994)

As regards humour, I found Ceal Floyer and Martin Creed to be at the extremes of KNOCK KNOCK's attempt to find some. Creed has always come across as a complete chancer, a charlatan, a fraud, and, frankly, a terrible artist. There was nothing about his Work No. 798 that did anything to disabuse me of that notion. The brochure claims, haughtily, that "Creed transforms everyday materials and actions into surprising meditations of the absurdity of the human experience". No, he it doesn't. If you want that, stick with my blog. I've written loads of shit about that.

Or, maybe try Ceal Floyer. Both her Mousehole and, even more so, her Saw manage to get us to look at prosaic, quotidian items in new ways. They're almost trompe l'oeils but silly little ones. It's their simplicity that charms in a way that Creed's bombastic nothingness never could. They made me smile. But I didn't laugh. I think I've made that clear enough already.

Martin Creed - Work No. 798 (2007)

Herman Chong - Oops! Something went wrong. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can (2016)

Basim Maghy - Good Things Happen When You Least Expect Them (2010)

Neither Herman Chong nor Basim Maghy made me smile but they both confused me. Chong had written, in Comic Sans obvs (these days, taking the piss out of Comic Sans is becoming as passe as using Comic Sans), on the gallery door in an attempt, successful it turned out, to confuse the visitor. It took less time to register than even the Lichtenstein but fair play, Chong. You got me this time. I'll see you coming next time.

Maghy's basketball hoop rendered in stainless steel, though? I knew it was art, bad art, from the start - but, even now, some days later, I can't work out what the idea behind it was. Was he trying to fool us into thinking the gallery had been used as a basketball court but they'd forgotten to clear the hoop away? If so, he'd failed - and Chong had already performed that trick to much better effect. The scratches on my head were starting to tear into the skin and the dandruff unearthed was speckling my collar and my newly purchased spectacles.

I left the main building of the South London Gallery and headed across, and down Peckham Road to their new annex in a converted fire station. I'd visited before, back in 2016, to see Under the Same Sun:Art from Latin America Today but, in those days, the building was incomplete and crude, though not without charm.

Now it's been dolled up into a three storey experience complete with book shop and a small room showing films. It's great that something of this nature exists on a mostly residential road between Camberwell and Peckham but one can only hope that it will, one day, be host to better art that than the stuff I found there as part of KNOCK KNOCK.

Ugo Rondinone (who'd recently exhibited in Regent's Park as part of Frieze) had done better than most. His confusingly titled If There were Anywhere but Desert, Friday was led, splayed out, across the floor of one gallery. A sleeping clown wrapped in a towel is more disturbing than it is funny but at least that meant I felt something. Which is certainly something I can't say for Rebecca Warren's The Cat Stays in the Picture.

A cute kitten, some shoelaces, string, straw, wool, pom-poms, and some stuff I couldn't identify all attached to an MDF board. It had the whiff of bad sixth form art. A real sense of "will this do?". I was distinctly unimpressed. No, it wouldn't do.

Ugo Rondinone - If There were Anywhere but Desert, Friday (2002)

Rebecca Warren - The Cat Stays in the Picture (2010)

Lynn Hershman Leeson - Biological Clock 2 (1995)

Lynn Hershman Leeson - Seduction (1985)

Lynn Hersham Leeson's works were more dated than they were crap. It was, or would once have been, a brave attempt to make comments about the commodification of the female body, the intentional, and accidental, patriarchal tendencies of the art world, and the dehumanising nature of technology. But I couldn't help thinking of Athena posters. Possibly not what Hershman Leeson had intended.

Sarah Lucas is famous for making work that, overtly, commentates on the male gaze, the way men describe and objectify the female body, and how that affects us all. Her work crops up pretty regularly and it can occasionally feel that this has caused it to lose some of its power. Which is a pity. Because it's a good trick and Lucas is a good artist. One of the better, most thoughtful, and even (almost) funny ones on display at this show. 

Sarah Lucas - Yves (2018)

Lucy Gunning - The Horse Impressionists (1994)

Lucy Gunning's Horse Impressionists was a waste of time. A seven minute film of people making horse noises. I suppose it would have the potential to be funny if it had been installed in the corner of a Carvaggio exhibition or something, just the sheer awkwardness and juxtaposition of it, but in a show that almost demands you find the works humorous it feels like it's trying to hard. Like one of those blokes (and they usually are blokes) in the pub who starts a joke by telling you he's going to tell a joke and then goes on for about ten fucking minutes while you live in mortal dread of a punchline whose lack of funniness was signposted as soon as he opened his mouth.

In a way, that's what KNOCK KNOCK was like. Like listening to someone you don't find funny telling jokes. I'd seen the work of Amelie von Wulffen before (in Clapham, last year) and, for the most part, liked it. But when I'm being told that not only is it funny (in some abstracted way, clearly) but also that the inherent humour somehow expresses some depth in the work that I'd not be able to spot myself, then I go back to scratching my head. I was loosening my skull by now.

Amelie von Wulffen - Untitled (2011-2015)

Tom Friedman - Untitled (silver foil guitarist) (2004)

Tom Friedman had made a guitarist out of silver foil, Danielle Dean had made a child's mobile that, judging by its title, was unsuitable for children, and Jayson Musson had put some novelty hats on a rack (ffs). In trying to say something about how some things are pretty useless these artists seemed to making quite a strong case for their own uselessness.

It seemed the further up into the building I went the less impressive, the more desperate the art was. What can one even say about Chila Kumaria Burman's ice cream or the Gelitin teddy bear that looks like he's returned worse for wear after a St Patrick's Day booze up? Very little. The art has been done before, done better before, and has now been done to death. My skull opened up, my brain started seeping out, I was soon to be done with this. I was thinking more about whether or not to go for a pint after (there are nice pubs in both Camberwell and Peckham but, for once, I didn't) than the art. The art was washing over me like so many pub bores telling rotten old jokes. 

Danielle Dean - She (2017)

Danielle Dean - KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN, version 2 (2018)

Jayson Musson - Many Nemes (2009-2018)

Chila Kumari Burman - eat me now (2012)

Gelitin - For a Presidential Office (2002)

Ryan Gander - Dominae Illud Opus Populare (2016)

Some faith was restored in the final room of the exhibition. I was able to reattach my skull to the rest of my head at least. The exhibition's co-curator Ryan Gander had at least provided a reasonably diverting work himself. It's often said of old paintings that the eyes seem to follow you round the room. Gander took this idea and ran with it.

In stark contrast with Rodney Graham, whose portrait of a Newspaper Man is devoid of any facial features whatsoever. My initial suspicion was that Jacob Rees-Mogg was lurking behind that periodical (see how he seeps into our, or at least my, subconscious) but it turns out it's a self-portrait. Of sorts. 

Rodney Graham - Newspaper Man (2016)

Jamie Isenstein - Onions (Charlie Brown to Clown Clown) (2015)

Jamie Isenstein - Onions (Mario to Clown Mouse) (2015)

Jamie Isenstein's selection of masks upon masks upon masks and Lily van der Stokker's pastel shades and friendly fonts weren't as impressive as the works by Gander and Graham but they were preferable to a lot they'd been filed alongside.  It had, on the whole, been a disappointing show - but it had still been a worthwhile experience. I still love the South London Gallery and I enjoyed the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Sarah Lucas, Rodney Graham, and Ceal Floyer to name but four. 

There were other artists on show who didn't even make the cut into the blog which probably gives you an idea of how unimpressive and disappointing the show was as a whole. There were dolls lining the stairs of the annex and there were 'pigeons' nesting in the eaves of the main building. If one of those dolls had started talking (talking dirty, maybe) or one of those pigeons had shat on the art below that would have been funnier, and a more pointed comment on contemporary art, than almost anything on show. 

It's said that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin and, if anything, this supposed comedy felt more like a tragedy. That tragedy being that some of these comedians are laughing all the way to the bank. Laugh? I nearly decided not to renew my Art card.

Lily van der Stokker - We also sell socks (2012)

Judith Hopf - Flock of sheep (2017)